Why Did Christ Have to Suffer Death? {Lord’s Day 16} BY William Boekestein for Core Christianity
(40) Q. Why did Christ have to suffer death?
A. Because God’s justice and truth require it: nothing else could pay for our sins except the death of the Son of God.(41) Q. Why was he “buried”?
A. His burial testifies that he really died.(42) Q. Since Christ has died for us, why do we still have to die?
A. Our death is not a payment for our sins, but only a dying to sins and an entering into eternal life.(43) Q. What further benefit do we receive from Christ’s sacrifice and death on the cross?
A. By his power our old man is crucified, put to death, and buried with him,so that the evil desires of the flesh may no longer rule us, but that instead we may offer ourselves as a sacrifice of thanksgiving to him.(44) Q. Why does the creed add, “He descended into hell”?
A. To assure me during attacks of deepest dread and temptation that Christ my Lord, by suffering unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul, on the cross but also earlier, has delivered me from hellish anguish and torment.
In 1905, a young man named Stuart Pierson was being initiated into a college fraternity. Other frat members bound him to a railroad bridge, which they thought was not in use. Tragically, an unscheduled train rumbled down the tracks that night, killing the young man. Hundreds of other examples of accidental hazing deaths have occurred over the years. You can hear those involved saying, “We only wanted to humble him a little. We didn’t mean to go all the way to his death.”
Why did Jesus humble himself so far that he was “dead, and buried; he descended into hell”? And how is this good news for us?
Confess Christ’s Final Humiliation
Jesus’s death and burial describe his literal history. It is one of the Catechism’s shortest and bluntest answers: Christ’s “burial testifies that he really died.” Only dead people are buried. The respected Jewish historian Josephus, who lived just after Jesus, documented his crucifixion and death under Pontius Pilate.[i] Josephus had little personal interest in Jesus—he covers the years in which Jesus walked the earth in about 75 pages, yet reports his entire life and death in three sentences. But as a historian he had to include this unavoidable fact: Jesus died. No truth was more certain to Jesus’s disciples. The resurrection demanded faith; Jesus’s death was obvious to everyone (Acts 26:26).
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